Ralph Waldo Emerson eBook

There were many shades of belief in the liberal churches.
If De Tocqueville’s account of Unitarian preaching
in Boston at the time of his visit is true, the Savoyard
Vicar of Rousseau would have preached acceptably in
some of our pulpits. In fact, the good Vicar might
have been thought too conservative by some of our
unharnessed theologians.

At the period when Emerson reached manhood, Unitarianism
was the dominating form of belief in the more highly
educated classes of both of the two great New England
centres, the town of Boston and the University at
Cambridge. President Kirkland was at the head
of the College, Henry Ware was Professor of Theology,
Andrews Norton of Sacred Literature, followed in 1830
by John Gorham Palfrey in the same office. James
Freeman, Charles Lowell, and William Ellery Channing
were preaching in Boston. I have mentioned already
as a simple fact of local history, that the more exclusive
social circles of Boston and Cambridge were chiefly
connected with the Unitarian or Episcopalian churches.
A Cambridge graduate of ambition and ability found
an opening far from undesirable in a worldly point
of view, in a profession which he was led to choose
by higher motives. It was in the Unitarian pulpit
that the brilliant talents of Buckminster and Everett
had found a noble eminence from which their light
could shine before men.

Descended from a long line of ministers, a man of
spiritual nature, a reader of Plato, of Augustine,
of Jeremy Taylor, full of hope for his fellow-men,
and longing to be of use to them, conscious, undoubtedly,
of a growing power of thought, it was natural that
Emerson should turn from the task of a school-master
to the higher office of a preacher. It is hard
to conceive of Emerson in either of the other so-called
learned professions. His devotion to truth for
its own sake and his feeling about science would have
kept him out of both those dusty highways. His
brother William had previously begun the study of Divinity,
but found his mind beset with doubts and difficulties,
and had taken to the profession of Law. It is
not unlikely that Mr. Emerson was more or less exercised
with the same questionings. He has said, speaking
of his instructors: “If they had examined
me, they probably would not have let me preach at
all.” His eyes had given him trouble, so
that he had not taken notes of the lectures which
he heard in the Divinity School, which accounted for
his being excused from examination. In 1826, after
three years’ study, he was “approbated
to preach” by the Middlesex Association of Ministers.
His health obliging him to seek a southern climate,
he went in the following winter to South Carolina
and Florida. During this absence he preached
several times in Charleston and other places.
On his return from the South he preached in New Bedford,
in Northampton, in Concord, and in Boston. His
attractiveness as a preacher, of which we shall have
sufficient evidence in a following chapter, led to
his being invited to share the duties of a much esteemed
and honored city clergyman, and the next position
in which we find him is that of a settled Minister
in Boston.